The more I think about it, the more I think I'm right in classifying some of Olafur Eliasson's most successful installations as a weird subset of film: light and motion. A couple weekends ago yukon_jack and the lovely A. were in town, and since yukon_jack operates at a truly rarefied level of Kultur, the agenda included a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see Take Your Time, a "greatest hits" compilation of Eliasson's photography, sculptures, installations, and whatever you call the things I really liked.

Digression: I'm interested, professionally and intellectually, in perception. (Q. "What do conspiracy theory, magic, ghosts, history, film, cooking, rhetoric, detective stories, game design, and myth have in common?") "How you see things" isn't the same as "how they are," and as obvious as that statement is, we none of us ever seem to act on it without a great deal of effort. This, by the way, may be the best possible reason to drink -- you can conduct your very own experiment into how easy it is to alter your perceptions of things, merely by applying a common solvent to them. Another good experiment is to stand under monochromatic light, such as Eliasson installed in Room For One Colour. Cleverly, he chose yellow, so all you see is tones of yellow and black. Unless you are a bee, in this room, you look like a none-too-freshly exhumed corpse, and probably one buried in a high-anthracite coal tailing. Why nobody has ever filmed a zombie movie in this light is beyond me.

Still another way is to enter the chromatic Cyclorama that is 360 Degree Room For All Colours, a round room with a completely featureless matte white interior -- onto which, through some technological witchery, the various colors of the spectrum are projected in a slightly complex series. Once you've stood in the middle of the space, walk right up to the wall until your entire field of vision -- no depth perception, as it's featureless -- is one color. Then that color changes, and you can literally feel your brain chemistry altering. We were calling it "the twelve-dollar Ecstasy room" (the MCA suggests a $12 donation), and I think yukon_jack and I might still be there if A. hadn't pulled us away to see the Art Institute.

What else? Eliasson's Ventilator -- a perfectly normal floor fan hung by a cable in the center of a room, blown around by its own spinning, recalled Foucault's Pendulum, Leonardo's Man, and every other pompous declaration of filled space. (It's funnier in the tiny space the MCA used than in the giant space in the linked video.) Once the joke hit us, we couldn't stop laughing -- it's rare to see Dada done right in these humorless days. We also thought that Dan Brown needed to write a novel in which the secret society kills the curator inside a Dadaist installation -- stop hiding the secrets in art anyone can understand, Illuminati! (Whoops, it just occurred to me that Christopher Fowler has already beaten Brown to the punch -- that's the setup to Ten Second Staircase. Oh well.)

The most beautiful piece, however, wasn't "film" or even Dada, but sculpture in waterfall: the aptly named Beauty. With this, the photography of islands, rivers, and caves, and Moss Wall (a wall covered with live reindeer moss), Eliasson reveals himself as ... a nature painter. He's a good old 21st-century Watteau or Poussin; where they had to put in nymphs, he has to put in Theory.

So to celebrate my birthday yesterday, I went up to the North Side and ate pho and saw Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a hugely enjoyable mashup of chambara and spaghetti-Western films into an explosion of weird, postmodern spectacle that at times looks more like Baz Luhrman than Takashi Miike, with costumes blending designer post-apocalyptic, 1970s-era Western, and Harajuku.

The movie concerns the war of the Heike (Taira) and Genji (Minamoto) clans, but the characters often refer to it as the War of the Roses, and the head of the Heike clan even renames himself "Henry". It's set in "Nevada," the subtitles explain, as they show the Japanese lettering on the wind-eroded Western sign over the town. The Reds and Whites have two giant Japanese tea-houses as headquarters, in the middle of a Western town straight outta Don Siegel.

The movie itself sets you up; almost the first line of dialogue after the credits (there's an extended tribute to the sound-stage Western tradition at the beginning, starring Quentin Tarantino) is something like "Best not get any ideas about playing Yojimbo on us, man." A sloppy, freewheeling remake of Yojimbo (out of Fistful of Dollars) immediately ensues, with occasional thefts from (or nods to) Corbucci's original Django among other movies.

But is it actually any good? This is the question posed by really great mashups like this that are, nonetheless, magpie nests or Frankenstein art: for example, the Venture Brothers. Even the crummiest spaghetti-Western knockoff, or cheesiest pop song, or lamest piece of French Academy historical painting, is saying something. Are mashups saying anything, or are they just commenting "I like Sergio Leone and samurai," or "Hey, 'Genie in a Bottle' has the same beat as a Strokes song." And where is the line -- is Kill Bill a mashup, or a reinterpretation? Is Grindhouse a mashup, or a tribute, or just cynical exploitation? And who's to say that cynical exploitation can't be art -- someone out there was moved by Monkees songs, after all, and I can attest to the saving power of the Sex Pistols. On a slightly more elevated note, does anyone really think that Shakespeare cared as much about The Merry Wives of Windsor, a ground-out Falstaff sequel to order, as he did about Henry IV, Part Two, in which Falstaff achieves uttermost heights of drama? Is there a difference between Falstaff and Django? I don't know. I know that I believe that Art comes from somewhere, and can come out in the oddest places. But I think we need (at least) two different kinds of awesome, to differentiate Django from "Django," and Jonny Quest from Venture Brothers, even though (or especially because) Venture Brothers is way more awesome than Jonny Quest.

Big night ends with the sun coming up through my window; that's how they mostly end, to be sure, but tonight I was downtown until 3 a.m. for Looptopia, a Chicago version of the "Nuit Blanche" they do in Paris and other cities not (quite) as wonderful as Chicago. Last year we made it all the way until dawn, but the meager breakfast reward in Millennium Park was so disproportioned to the night that this year we ejected ante-anti-climax.

But before that, we saw a re-imagining of More Songs About Buildings And Food with a joyous crowd vibe (and a crowd that was, on average, considerably younger than the album, your humble narrator excepted), and Daniel Burnham cornices standing out against the reflective sky like a screen grab from God's Blu-Ray, and a rhythm-and-rec-room band playing behind acrobats and stilt-walkers in a Midnight (EDT) Circus in Daley Plaza, and all the art the Fine Arts Building would show us including a So-Creepy Little-Girl Sphinx by Richard Laurent that is the best Changeling cover never used (and sadly not on his website), and a giant glowing piece of hard candy, and a late-night book sale, and a kite parade, and "The Weird Sisters" (who billed themselves as "naughty vaudeville" but were more "normal music-hall") in Adler and Sullivan's sublime Auditorium Theatre, and an hour of an experimental film group only just a wee bit too much in love with itself but entrancingly earnest withal, and horrible Dunkin' Donuts mocha latte but every other coffee shop mysteriously decided to leave thousands of dollars just sitting in the street for others to pick up ...

... and some really awesome fire dancers. For that show, we started back behind the crowd, unable to see anything except on the tiny display screens of the digital cameras being held above us. "What's the opposite of Jumbotron?" I asked my companions. Responded wisely bigstokes80: "Tron." And so it was, and upon tron upon tron we watched the dancers spin and twirl flaming hula hoops and batons and bolas and staves, fighting and mating and claiming and presenting, with their fires flapping desperate bids for liberty in the wind off the river, seeing them scattered on tiny screens in all sorts of light-setting and freeze-frame defaults, a fractal vision of postmodern paganism complete with communal soul-capture almost as entrancing in its way as the actual spectacle.

* * * *

Which I eventually did see, thanks to my osmotic eeling powers, as I shouldered toward the front row throughout, occupying niches emptied in the demos as sated spectators fell back or ran off to some other delight, until I had as good a view as anyone not pounding away at a bongo drum. I remember thinking, of the slim blonde fire-eater, that I was surprised that I was surprised that she had a pierced tongue. In retrospect, once you've gone in for fire-eating, a little tongue-piercing is like a walk on the beach, I imagine.

* * * *

All this plus Hot Doug's for lunch and another Nikkatsu Action New Wave film (Velvet Hustler) at the Siskel Center, serendipitously keeping us out of the rain, and Iron Man in digital projection tomorrow with Hop Haus burger to follow. My city is so very, very good to me.

Thoroughly worthy human being and game designer robin_d_laws is in Finland right now for Ropecon, having the time of my life. (I had the time of my life last year.) But unlike me under those circumstances, Robin isn't just settling for lame puns and slack-jawed tourist highlights. Indeed, he's characteristically brimming with thought-making prosody.

In his LJ post about the Atheneum museum in Helsinki, he notes:

To check out a national tradition one is unfamiliar with is a pleasantly disorienting experience of outsider status. It’s especially intriguing to be confronted with works which are iconic within their national context but carry no particular resonance to you.

Robin fingers two Akseli Gallen-Kallela paintings as Finnish national icons, noting in his comment thread that "Without the wall text I'd have liked them but not guessed that they were iconic works."

Me, either -- I would have thought something like Gallen-Kallela's Aino Triptych was more "nationally iconic." But Robin further demonstrates his criteria by identifying Tom Thomson's "The Jack Pine" as Canada's iconic national painting. With no possible offense meant to my Canadian readership, I have never heard of this painting, and would certainly have had no idea that it was a national icon just looking at it. (I might have been able to guess it was Canadian, though, if someone told me ahead of time that it wasn't American.)

All of which made me stop and ponder -- what is America's "iconic national painting"? Is it Gilbert Stuart's unfinished Washington portrait? Emmanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware"? Grant Wood's "American Gothic"? Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks"?

Robin does gloss the issue a bit, leaving us some wiggle room:

We [Canadians] don’t really invest particular canvases with this significance. Instead we give the nod to the trademark subject matter of each canonical artist: any halfway decent Lawren Harris glacier, Cornelius Kreighoff snow scene, or Emily Carr totem pole carries roughly the same freight.

So maybe America's iconic national painting is any halfway decent Frederic Remington cowboy, Georgia O'Keefe cow skull, Norman Rockwell family scene, Frank Paul spacecraft, Albert Bierstadt mountain, or Andy Warhol celebrity silk-screen.

But I think it's more fun to make people pick one picture and defend it. Ideally per the Laws Criterion, it should be a picture that foreigners have barely heard of, or at least (unlike the Gilbert Stuart and the Emmanuel Leutze) might not immediately seem nationally iconic to them. Also ideally, most Americans should be able to look at it and say "Yep. That's us all over." So what's your pick for America's iconic national painting?

And if you're not American, go ahead and tell me what you think it might be, and tell me what your own national iconic painting is, even if you have to cop out and say it's "any decent Constable cliffscape."

Oh, you want to know my pick? Winslow Homer's "Breezing Up."

This last weekend, I was blessed with the mellifluous company and smooth jazz stylings of yukon_jack, who immediately fell to work at his twin gifts of keeping my blood alcohol (we were drinking mostly Moscow Mules at home) and my cultural intake elevated.

Admittedly, on Wednesday he had to go see Grinderman and I had to go see a screening of a bunch of Harry Smith experimental shorts, but on Thursday we hooked up for a little architecture (they're at last letting us rabble into the ground floor of the Rookery Building lobby again, although you still can't go up on the balconies) and for the Jeff Wall exhibit at the Art Institute. Wall is a tremendously challenging artist, as his stuff essentially mocks both the Cartier-Bresson 'Decisive Moment' as self-glorifying bushwa, and the Modernist painters' photography-induced flight from Realism as cowardice. Where does that leave photography, then? Not his problem.

But the greatest illustration of the power of illustration was not until Saturday, as Friday was the Feast of St. TiVo Redivivus, complete with my Jim Beam pork chops for all.

So Saturday morning, on the train to meet kaynorr and gracefuleigh I mentioned that of all the T-shirts I own, the only ones to consistently get a positive response outside the gaming world are my Green Lantern shirt (neither Batman nor Captain America, two far better-known heroes, get the civilian love that GL does) and my Clash shirts. This came up because I was wearing my Clash "Kamikaze" shirt, which over the course of that very day got me:

* a free Coke at Hot Doug's (just the thing to wash down a breakfast of Blue Cheese Pork Sausage with Apple Creme Fraiche and Toasted Almonds) from Doug himself, who had just recently driven to Cleveland to see the Clash exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame;
* a shout-out ("only band that matters!") from a guy waiting for a bus on Belmont as yukon_jack and I walked to the Blue Line;
* a fist-pump from a guy in the crowd at the Wicker Park Fest as we, by this time amplified with his_regard and gnosticpi, watched the clumpy and mournful "Creedence Clearance-Sale Revival" stylings of Catfish Haven;
* an "Awesome shirt, dude" from another g.i.t.c. as I went to get a steak sandwich after seeing the much superior band Maritime, which performed a set perhaps best characterized as "The Replacements' Tribute To Ken Hite's CD Collection";
* another crowd-guy shout-out on the way to buy an urgently self-prescribed Red Bull during Centro-Matic's dreary-sounding opening song;
* a lengthy discourse on the awesomeness of the Clash, punk rock in general, and my shirt, complete with rubbing its decal, from the proprietor of Retro Image Apparel, which had a lot of excellent-looking shirts for sale, mostly covers of pulp magazines, though sadly not of either of H.P. Lovecraft's only two magazine covers;
* and a drunken chest-slap holler of 'Clash! Shirt! Woooah!' from across the street on my way back from the last entry.

Although a lot of people were wearing Cool Band Shirts, this being a) Wicker Park, and b) a music festival/street fair, I didn't see anybody else get Random Crowd Guy love -- or, wearing a Clash shirt. Just saying.

Centro-Matic pulled it together to produce a really tight "Uncle Tupelo vs. Nebraska" set, after which we left the Fest victorious. That was it for shirt love, as the young lady working the counter at Cooking Fools was barely interested in me as a commercial entity (the watermelon-cucumber-mint Popsicle was mighty tasty, though) much less as a sartorial good-will ambassador for the Only Band That Matters.

Which is certainly her prerogative, but I bet nobody gives her shirt drunken shout-outs from across the street.

The fun actually started Thursday night, at kaynorr's Game Four party, when the only thing enlivening the sorry spectacle of the Detroit Tigers' utter disintegration was reminding kaynorr that they had beaten the Yankees. gnosticpi and I hit the Encore bar on Randolph afterwards to await my houseguest Ben, in town to pick up an award from the Military Reporters & Editors. In that connection, I just want to note that apparently being embedded in Afghanistan, and being an award-winning journalist, does not convey any special skill at finding your way to the Encore bar on Randolph. ("Lost in his own museum.") Fortunately our waitress was understanding.

Then Friday mollpeartree and I went to the optimistically-named South Loop, to a Mad Hatter Mad Tea Party thrown by a collective including snowy_owlet. We had to wear a hat or a costume, so I wore my authentic Mao hat by way of monstrosity -- after all, as I pointed out to the occasional interlocutor, Dracula never killed 60 million people. There, I drank tea steeped in vodka, and gin laced with tea, and had a delightful conversation with cassielsander of that perfect cocktail-party sort where you both just agree with each other in different keys. Our topic, should you care, was Shakespeare movies. A great scene and a cool crowd, and my only regret was that I couldn't talk with everyone there.

Saturday, my houseguest Ben, suitably awarded, blew off the rest of his agenda, so I ditched on Hot Doug's and Marie Antoinette (I know, I know, but hard choices are sometimes necessary) and we all went to Snail for lunch instead. We got him packed off just in time for my_tallest to drop by with a liter of Wyborowa, and the two of us rang in Daylight Savings Time with plenty of catchup conversation and Wybo-and-tonics.

Sunday morning therefore began far too early, but it was a glorious crisp autumn day in Chicago -- 48 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, perfect weather for our annual Day of the Dead trip to Pilsen. This one was one for yukon_jack -- we hit the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum for its Day of the Dead Exhibit. Each year, they have a number of ofrendas as well as Day of the Dead themed art on display -- this time there was an ofrenda (for a corrido singer killed in a car crash) using the visual vocabulary of the American roadside shrine -- cheap flowers and teddy bears -- alongside broken windshield glass and a toy car. Along with some wild, hallucinatory sculptures (e.g., a vulture feeding a shrieking calavera to its young, all atop a gaily mosaicked skull), this was probably the highlight. At the gift shop, I found a Dover book of Posada prints, and we got the requisite sugar skulls. Then off to Nuevo Leon, the best Mexican restaurant in Chicago not run by someone named Bayless. I had a terrific carne a la Tampiquena, but snowy_owlet was the big winner with an absolutely sublime machaca con huevos. Then off to Bombon (a gourmet Mexican bakery) for Pan de Muertos and an amaretto tres leches cupcake that would have had yukon_jack weeping with joy.

And then a three-hour nap.

Mine excellent host was not feeling up to full snuff this morning, so Nottingham was off. Instead, I went on a pilgrimage of my own, to the National Gallery to visit the greatest painting of the nineteenth century.

James and I had stopped off in front of the Gallery yesterday so that I could see the statue of George Washington in front of it (he'd been behind a hoarding the last few trips to London). But today, I braved it alone. I forewent the special exhibit, "Portrait of the Artist as Self-Aggrandizing Whiner-Baby," refusing to be distracted -- Turner or bust!

It turns out that Turner's masterpiece isn't actually right up front; one has to push through a Leonardo or two, plus a great wodge of Botticellis and Titians and Rubenses and Caravaggios and Goyas and Monets and Van Goghs and other foreign tat to get to it.

But get to it I did, and I probably spent half an hour in that room, looking at it and at the other Turner masterpieces hung there. Seeing his Rain, Steam and Speed in the flesh reminded me of James' and my discovery last year that Turner had essentially invented, perfected, and overmastered Impressionism a generation before the French ever noticed.

A few nice surprises included Salvator Rosa's Witches at their Incantations, which has a lovely skeleton-monster in it (and seems to document the process of making a hand of glory), and Beuckelaer's Four Elements, a quartet of wonderful paintings that emblematize the Pythagorean unities as hyper-realistic food. I was also pleased to discover that the National has the painted originals of Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode, so Wm. H. and I shared a contented fifteen minutes or so together.

And, in a special bonus for wyrdwood, it turns out that the National holds Akseli Gallen-Kallela's Lake Keitele. Even in the heart of London, I got a breath of Finnish joy.

* Like hackard, I associated Clerks II and A Scanner Darkly with each other. Both films are dialogue-driven (not to say talky), both are not about what they seem to be about on the surface, and both mark the return to form of one of "my directors." I feel very possessive of directors (and to a lesser extent, films) discovered by me and his_regard back in the day of "every Thursday is movie night, no matter whether we've heard of it or not," and I believe that he and I have hooked up to see every Smith and almost every Linklater on the big screen. (He saw Before Sunset when I couldn't make it -- neither of us bothered with Bad News Bears, and I, at least, waited for TiVo to bring me School of Rock.) Likewise, this time around.

And dei gratia, both mark returns to old-school form -- Clerks II in obvious fashion (but kudos to Kevin for realizing the real story arc is the love story between Dante and Randal), but Scanner could almost be a remake of Slacker with one or two viewpoint changes. Speaking of changes, there are a couple things changed from the book, seemingly with the goal of making Donna sympathetic, which is odd but kind of sweet. And here's the difference between a good adaptation and a bad one -- I finished re-reading the novel the day before I saw Scanner, and I genuinely wondered what would happen next while watching the film. The opposite happened, you may recall, during my viewing of V for Vendetta. Here endeth the lesson.

* Okay, okay, you can go click on the new Out of the Box column now. Takeaway nugget: the Requiem Chronicler's Guide is every bit as good as wordwill promised it would be when he gave me a review copy at Origins. Maybe even a leetle bit better.

* Last weekend, yukon_jack blew into town, and set off his usual temblors of alcoholic culture. After a somewhat embarrassing misunderstanding (which got us a meal in Pilsen, so I don't care), we hit the Art Institute's small but lively Posada installation, although every minute we spent listening to the gallery talk instead of looking at the art I could feel us getting stupider. Then, much drinking ensued, and Chicago Rich was good enough to put up with my drunken blackguarding of Modernism, which technically began while cold sober. But it's always good to vent, and I got to ride the Pink Line, so Viva El Sanfordo.

* Last-minute Smatter!: I almost forgot! Yesterday, I got a lovely comp copy of Jonathan Walton's Push, the newest inheritor of the long-mourned Interactive Fantasy mantle, being a serious (well, mostly serious -- there's some back-sass in the margins from 'guest commentators,' just like in an old-school Shadowrun sourcebook) journal (it's way too nice to be a zine) of RPG theory. This ish, we have jhkimrpg on building an immersive campaign, Emily Care Boss on formally distributed "GM" responsibilities, games from Jonathan Walton and Shreyas Sampat (the latter being a game from the AH where RPGs developed from Hindu temple dance), and neo-Marxist bitching from Eero Tuovinen. All in all, a great read.

* Tonight, I get dinner with chebutykin and cajones, who are down for Wizard World, which I shall miss; tomorrow, hook up with revjohn for far too little time; Sunday, fly to Finland for Ropecon. Hence, my next post will be from the Land of Sorcerous Reindeer, where we'll see if Eero Saarinen and Alvar Aalto can smack some Modernism back into me.

* Turns out Karl Marx and Ivan Turgenev were exact contemporaries. (Born 1818, died 1883.) They both attended the University of Berlin between 1838 and 1841, to boot.

* Jean Béraud is, in my mind, mis-identified as an Impressionist, and furthermore would make a dandy centerpiece to a "Reactionary Art of the Belle Epoque" exhibit, or something like that.

* It is, in fact, possible to write a novel using the word "Scots-Irish" over a million billion times. Or at least to write a novel that feels like that. Other than that, Eric Flint's The Rivers of War is pretty decent, even gripping in its Flinty way, although I call shenanigans on its AH. (Sam Houston is only lightly wounded at Horseshoe Bend, so he's going to convince the Cherokees to voluntarily emigrate to Arkansas and set up a wonderful multicultural Scots-Irish paradise as a truly independent nation.) Also, I call shenanigans on a Catholic Ulsterman viewpoint character self-identifying as "Scots-Irish" (a term restricted to the Lowland Scot Protestants settled in the Ulster "Plantations"), and quite frankly, on anyone using that term at all in 1812, when the OED cites only go back to the 1980s for it. ("Scotch-Irish" was the term of art back then, and even then I'd wager decent money that the Scots-Irish themselves self-identified as either Scots or Irish or perhaps Ulstermen.) If you think I've spent way too much time banging on about the word "Scots-Irish" in the discussion of a novel, well, now you know what it feels like to read The Rivers of War. (For an even less charitable, but still on-target, review by our own nihilistic_kid, go here).

* Clare Asquith may be on to something in Shadowplay, but her larger argument (Shakespeare's secret Catholicism [*] is the key to a secret code by which we can read his plays, and thus prove his secret Catholicism) is laughably circular. Also, she wants to have things both ways -- "dark" characters represent Protestantism (from the dark clothes worn by Puritans), except when they don't, like Cleopatra, who represents rather Jesuitism "tanned" from "laboring in the vineyard" of England, or like Hamlet, who represents Sir Philip Sidney. But wait, you say, Sir Philip Sidney was Protestant. No he wasn't, saith Asquith; he was secretly Catholic, and so therefore is Hamlet. There's also a bit of "modern scholarship agrees" type waffle in the footnotes, which is what you put in there when you can't actually find any scholarship that agrees with you, or at best one cranky book that claimes Sir Philip Sidney was secretly Catholic. That said dismissively, the increasing evidence for an Elizabethan police state[**] would logically imply an Elizabethan samizdat, concealed in ostensibly supportive or neutral art, just like Stalinism produced. Did the Elizabethan police state attempt to control and coerce playwrights? Absolutely -- see Kyd, Marlowe, Nashe, Jonson, and etc. Could Shakespeare have produced such samizdat? Clearly. Did he? Much harder to say, and much harder to separate from in-jokes for his patrons, topical allusions that we moderns just don't get, and so forth.

* Chopin had not heard or read a Beethoven concerto when he wrote his first two piano concerti. Go figure! He must have independently derived Romanticism, although he did probably hear a lot of popular guff that itself was building on Beethoven.

* Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm was not nearly as bad as kaynorr and gnosticpi said, but it sure could have used a third act that made any kind of sense, and a B-plot, and more Monica Bellucci. Also, I'm not sure who told Heath Ledger to deliver all his lines around a mouthful of Skittles, but he should stop it.

* Damnation, Braum's Cherry Limeade sherbet is terrific.

[*] The "Catholic Shakespeare" of Asquith, Wood, Wilson, Greenblatt, and so forth looks to me, for all the impressive circumstantial evidence, like yet another fad, albeit one better supported (and less offensive to history and literature) than the "proletarian Shakespeare" produced by ignorant Marxist critics of the last generation.

[**] See, for instance, Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era, which I read about half of at Phil Masters' house in 2003 courtesy of his pull with the Cambridge University Library, and have coveted ever since.

Well, all of the shows James mentioned Friday were already sold out for the weekend by Saturday morning, because of how good they no doubt were. So, nothing daunted, we went to the Tate Britain, bypassed their "Turner Whistler Monet" exhibit and merely drank in a few small glories of the permanent collection, notably Blake and Turner, to say nothing of, oh, Fuseli and Constable and other minor works of that nature.

Although thwarted in our quest for tea and cakes at Fortnum & Mason (it seems that idea had occurred to a lot of other folks right around tea-time for some reason), we did make the mandatory pilgrimage to Foyle's (where I got a present for mollpeartree, not being totally lost to reason) and hit John Sandoe, a deeply cool bookshop off King's Road where I bought a book about a poisoning at the court of James I (thus, half a present for mollpeartree and half a present for myself) but passed up, agonizing, Philip Hoare's England's Lost Eden, due to the New Austerity, because by my rough calculation, a £25 book now costs roughly $3,479.82 in American cowrie-shell money.

I was consoled by dinner at Tsunami, unfortunately named perhaps, but founded by a former chef from Nobu, with all that implies. Among other things, we enjoyed the "piece of cod that surpasseth all understanding," grilled in some sort of black bean and miso sauce, and some truly impressive sashimi.

Then back to chez Wallis for Anchorman and The Devil Rides Out, on Clive Barker's old television. Today remains in quantum flux; tomorrow, back to Chicago until Wednesday, when it's back to Vegas for (eventually) GTS.

Interestingly enough, my trip to Oklahoma City last weekend to see my parents was a high-culture trip. It's always got *some* culture in it, since my dad is an architect and we usually talk at least a little about architecture, but this trip, woah!

On Saturday, we went out to see the Cini-Alliata collection of Etruscan Treasures at the Mabee-Gerrer Museum of Art in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The catalog was one of the most scholarly I've ever flipped through; if I had either a job or a more compelling interest in the art of the goldsmith, I would have bought it. I wondered whether there is any possible connection between Etruscan and Scythian goldsmithing techniques -- to my eye, they had some similarities, although Etruscan work is more delicate -- but it just may be that there's only so many different ways to get a horse design into a sheet of gold leaf. There was sadly precious little evidence for my own personal theory that the Etruscans were ruled by vampires; there was rather more evidence for my rather more serious theory that Rome was simply the most successful Etruscan city. (Yes, I know the Latins were linguistically, and therefore quite likely ethnically, different from the Etruscans. The Latins were Etruscanized just as the Gauls and later the Franks were Romanized; nobody would say that Paris isn't a "Latin city" merely because it's full of Celts and Teutons.)

On Sunday, we saw the very well-curated "Millet to Matisse" exhibit from the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, which is currently at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, which is brand new since last I was in OKC. (OKC spent something like $600 million and got a new art museum, a new river park, a new downtown library, and a couple of other buildings that escape me right now -- we spent almost $500 million and got Millennium Park, complete with embarrassing Gehry pimple. Talk about your corruption tax.) I took away mostly a burning desire to see a similarly good show focused on Turner and Constable, along with a renewed appreciation for Corot and Braque, the bookends of Impressionism.

I even ate Vietnamese food, courtesy of the expanding and increasingly prosperous "Little Saigon" neighborhood where in my day, the Vietnamese refugees used to open horrible, horrible Chinese restaurants instead.

And, of course, I had good Mexican food, which is not technically impossible in Chicago.

So here's to you, my teenage wasteland! Extend your pinky with pride while tossing back your Coors Light. You've earned it.

As ganked from the mighty, mighty weblog of the still mightier-than-that bruceb, the ultimate in "Choose or Perish" -- the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. This is an arts-geek version of the "Two Kinds of People" game, where you say "Beatles or Stones?" and mercilessly pillory people who say "Beatles."

( 100 Questions Later... )

I scored 56% agreement with Teachout, with 7 "no opinion".

Take it at home and see!